Garth Rattray | The hallowed weenie

Halloween is celebrated on October 31 each year. It began with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. People lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward off ghosts. It became synonymous with scariness and horror. Many movies, books and television shows revolve around the Halloween theme of ghosts, goblins, crazed murderers, otherworldly aliens, and frightening nightmares. But there is something that is scarier than any Halloween ghoul or vicious creature, it’s the hallowed weenie.

Hallowed is a descriptive word that means ‘revered’ (highly esteemed), among other things. And ‘weenie’ is often used as a slang word for phallus (the male sexual organ). The phallus is so revered that many cultures, intentionally or unintentionally, create images, artefacts, and representational structures of it. Civilisations like the Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, European, and several in the Far East erected (pardon the pun) statues, buildings and designed artwork with the phallus as the central theme.

Some depicted the phallus to represent fertility, and others depicted it as a show of strength, prosperity, and power. The famous obelisk was considered symbolic of the ‘masculine’ earth. Some view modern-day skyscrapers as phallic symbols of wealth and prosperity. The taller the skyscraper, the more affluent and successful the city and country. When Jeff Bezos, the world-famous businessman billionaire, launched a New Shepard rocket (his literal skyscraper) with three people onboard, it was the first unpiloted suborbital flight. One could not help but notice and wonder at its distinctive phallic appearance. Was this intentional or unintentional? We may never know.

Although the phallic symbol is mostly used to represent fertility, I am not certain why this is so. Without an egg, a ‘receptacle’ and an ‘incubator’, the phallus cannot be fertile. Be that as it may, men have come to see themselves as superior, more powerful, and more necessary than women. This is a farce…I refer to it as the ‘phallic fallacy’. From a physical standpoint, the phallus is an efficient conduit in the human reproductive cycle and for the elimination of urine. Of course, it is also used for coital pleasure.

VERITABLE WEAPON

Sadly, some men see their phallus as a veritable weapon in their physical, economic, and emotional conquest of women. That sort of attitude never bodes well for relationships and is toxic to family life. The more insecure the man, the more he depends on his weenie to dominate others. Some men channel their entire psyche through their weenies…and that inevitably ends badly for them, for relationships, families, communities, and for the country.

Weenies are not as hardy as they appear. Their ability to become turgid is also their Achilles’ heel. They can ‘break’ (become torn) if too much physical pressure is put on them under certain circumstances. Their tumescence wanes with age. They also wane when men become fatigued, if they use recreational substances, are psychologically stressed, are conflicted (as in cognitive dissonance), and also with uncontrolled non-communicable diseases like hypertension and/or diabetes. In fact, some men would rather die than lose the use of their hallowed weenie.

Men with hallowed weenies are susceptible to (unreasonable) jealousy, hate, and sometimes even murderous rage. Murder and murder-suicides occur far too often, all because of the hallowed weenie. This common sex-based jealousy needs to be superseded by the realisation that walking away from an emotionally painful situation is immeasurably better than inflicting pain on many others through violence.

Perhaps the greatest horror of the hallowed weenie is the phantom phallus syndrome. Some men romance women, engage in coitus, impregnate them, then disappear like ghosts. The absence of a male figure was found to be the primary cause of unlawful behaviour in young males. When taking the family history of many patients, it is common for them to reveal that they never met, or barely know, their father. We don’t need hallowed weenies; we need hallowed fatherhood.

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.